You can run JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi, an inexpensive ARM development board. This page describes how to set up your board to run JavaFX.

Prerequisites

You will need:

Touch screens known to work with JavaFX are:

In general a touch screen that is recognized by Linux and generates events EV_KEY, EV_ABS and EV_SYN will work with JavaFX.

Raspberry Pi OS

The configuration used by Oracle for testing is:

Note that you need the hard-float Raspbian image. If you use the soft-float Debian "wheezy" image you will not be able to run JDK 8 (or any other software compiled for ARM hard float).

Raspbian setup instructions are at http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup.

For JavaFX you will want to make sure the GPU has enough memory to work with. A 50%/50% split of memory between the CPU and GPU works well.

If the Raspberry Pi isn't detecting the screen size correctly, you might need to tweak video mode settings and maybe tell the Pi to ignore the capabilities reported by the display.

Running a JDK Early Access build on the Raspberry Pi

You can get a early access build for ARM hard float from http://jdk8.java.net/download.html. This bundle should be unpacked on the Pi. For example,

sudo tar zxvf jdk-8-ea-b97-linux-arm-vfp-hflt-03_jul_2013.tar.gz -C /opt

To check that the JDK is installed correctly, run:

/opt/jdk1.8.0/bin/java -version

This should show that you are running an EA build of JDK 8. If the VM won't even start, you might be running a hard-float VM on a soft-float system.

You can use the samples bundle from https://jdk8.java.net/download.html on the Raspberry Pi. Not all the samples will work on the Pi; here are some that will:

You can run these applications without any additional parameters. For example,

/opt/jdk1.8.0/bin/java -cp Stopwatch.jar stopwatch.MainScreen

Note that the default configuration of JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi does not use X11. Instead JavaFX works directly with the display framebuffer and input devices. So you should not have the X11 desktop running when starting JavaFX.

JDK 8 EA builds for the Raspberry Pi include full support for hardware accelerated graphics, with everything from the base, graphics, controls and FXML modules. Media and Web modules are not included.